Five games are not even a third of an NFL season, but they are usually enough to separate the contenders from the teams already playing for next year. Since the league settled at 32 clubs in 2002, 133 teams have opened a season 1–4. Ten of them were still playing in January, a success rate of 7.5 percent. Of the 43 teams that lost their first five games, not one made it.
The move to a 14-team playoff field in 2020 has done less for slow starters than the extra spot suggests. In the 12-team era, from 2002 to 2019, 8 of 98 teams climbed out of a 1–4 hole (8.2 percent). Since 2020 it has happened twice in 35 tries (5.7 percent). The seventh seed has mostly helped the teams in the middle: clubs that started 2–3 reached the postseason 22.1 percent of the time before the expansion and 27.1 percent after it.
Where the 2026 season stands
Through four weeks, five clubs were still looking for their first win: the Houston Texans, Tennessee Titans, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Los Angeles Chargers and Miami Dolphins, all 0–4. History offers that group very little. None of the 68 teams that opened 0–4 since 2002 reached the playoffs.
Four more teams sat at 1–3: the New Orleans Saints, New York Jets, Arizona Cardinals and Washington Commanders. That hole is deep but not bottomless, since 24 of 178 teams (13.5 percent) recovered from 1–3 to play in the postseason. Houston knows the route better than anyone, having escaped 0–3 starts in both 2018 and 2025. Two of the winless clubs meet in Week 5, when Houston visits Tennessee, so one of them will fall to 0–5 unless the game ends in a tie.
The odds at every record after five games
The table follows each team’s first five regular-season games, in the order they were played, across the 2002 to 2025 seasons: 24 seasons and 768 team-seasons in all. A team counts as a playoff team if it played at least one postseason game that year.
| Record | Teams | Made playoffs | Rate | 2002–2019 (12 teams) | 2020–2025 (14 teams) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5–0 | 47 | 42 | 89.4% | 86.8% (33 of 38) | 100.0% (9 of 9) |
| 4–1 | 119 | 91 | 76.5% | 73.3% (63 of 86) | 84.8% (28 of 33) |
| 3–1–1 | 2 | 2 | 100.0% | 100.0% (1 of 1) | 100.0% (1 of 1) |
| 3–2 | 220 | 110 | 50.0% | 47.6% (79 of 166) | 57.4% (31 of 54) |
| 2–2–1 | 7 | 0 | 0.0% | 0.0% (0 of 5) | 0.0% (0 of 2) |
| 2–3 | 193 | 45 | 23.3% | 22.1% (32 of 145) | 27.1% (13 of 48) |
| 1–3–1 | 4 | 0 | 0.0% | 0.0% (0 of 1) | 0.0% (0 of 3) |
| 1–4 | 133 | 10 | 7.5% | 8.2% (8 of 98) | 5.7% (2 of 35) |
| 0–5 | 43 | 0 | 0.0% | 0.0% (0 of 36) | 0.0% (0 of 7) |
The sharpest drop in the table sits between 3–2 and 2–3. A 3–2 team is a coin flip, with 110 of 220 reaching the playoffs. Swap one of those wins for a loss and the rate falls to 45 of 193, or 23.3 percent. At the other end, a 4–1 start sent 91 of 119 teams to the postseason (76.5 percent), and even a perfect start guarantees nothing: five of the 47 teams that began 5–0 stayed home.
Earlier checkpoints
Counting after three and four games shows how quickly the window closes.
| Record | Teams | Made playoffs | Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0–3 | 112 | 2 | 1.8% |
| 0–4 | 68 | 0 | 0.0% |
| 1–3 | 178 | 24 | 13.5% |
Only two of the 112 teams that began 0–3 made the playoffs, and both were from Houston: the 2018 Texans and the 2025 Texans.
The ten teams that came back from 1–4
Each of these clubs turned a 1–4 start into a playoff berth. The links open the full season, game by game.
- 2002 New York Jets, who finished 9–7
- 2002 Tennessee Titans, who finished 11–5
- 2004 Green Bay Packers, who finished 10–6
- 2011 Denver Broncos, who finished 8–8
- 2015 Houston Texans, who finished 9–7
- 2015 Kansas City Chiefs, who finished 11–5
- 2016 Miami Dolphins, who finished 10–6
- 2018 Indianapolis Colts, who finished 10–6
- 2020 Washington, who finished 7–9
- 2024 Los Angeles Rams, who finished 10–7
Two of them got in without a winning record: Denver at 8–8 in 2011 and Washington at 7–9 in 2020. A soft division can matter as much as a hot finish.
Five perfect starts that ended at home
- 2003 Minnesota Vikings, who finished 9–7
- 2009 Denver Broncos, who finished 8–8
- 2009 New York Giants, who finished 8–8
- 2015 Atlanta Falcons, who finished 8–8
- 2016 Minnesota Vikings, who finished 8–8
What it means for this season’s strugglers
Roughly one 1–4 team in 13 has found its way into the playoffs, and no 0–5 team has done it in this period. These are base rates built from records alone. They know nothing about a quarterback returning from injury, a gentle schedule down the stretch or a division without a clear leader, and those are exactly the things that carried most of the ten comeback teams above. For a club at 1–4, the useful question is how many winnable games are left, not how many have already been lost.
How we counted
We used final scores from the WHYNFL results archive for the 2002 through 2025 seasons, the 32-team era. Ties are kept as ties, so a 2–2–1 team appears separately from a 2–3 team. The 2022 Buffalo–Cincinnati game that was never completed has no result and is not counted. The current season is left out of the tables because it is still being played.
Related: NFL standings and playoff picture · strength of schedule · NFL playoff history
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